Progressive revelation

A wonderful thing about the Word of God is that It is forever unfolding, becoming clearer and more defined as more Light is given, and going deeper than we could ever imagine. In fact, for all eternity, the Word of God shall continually unfold more and more to us, because It is the inexhaustible fountain of God’s eternal thoughts. As television picture went from black and white, to colour, to high definition, and then to ultra-high definition, so the Word of God is exactly the same. The message of the hour is the keys that unlocked the Bible to unravel tremendous truths of great revelations that continuously explode forth with ever increasing definition from its pages, like the burst of a Roman candle. Added to this are the layers of revelation that exist in the Bible, for we have come to learn that its types and shadows can have compound meaning, and with a skillful eye that is anointed by the Holy Spirit, the multi-layered typology of the Bible can be identified and connected to its antitype.

No matter how much understanding we develop in a lifetime of studying God’s Word, yet we will not have so much as scratched the surface of the available knowledge that exists within It. A well-studied and seasoned man in the Word will readily agree that the more he has learnt, the more he realizes how much he doesn’t know; for if we spent every hour of every day for a lifetime in the scriptures and the message, yet the knowledge and understanding we will have gained is so miniscule, like a grain of sand on the beach, or a drop of water in the ocean.

The prophet of God was no exception to the principle of progressive revelation, or understanding that develops over time, for when we look at his ministry, he taught things in the early days that completely changed later on; and this was especially so after the full opening of the Word by the revelation of the seven seals in 1963. He once taught that the rider of the white horse in Revelation 6:2 was Jesus Christ, but was later shown by God that the rider was actually the Antichrist. He taught that the new birth and the Spirit baptism were different, but later realized that they were the same thing. He taught of a body, soul, and spirit, and later got the order correct of body, spirit, and soul. He once taught that the evidence of the Holy Ghost was love, but one day in a vision the Lord showed him that the evidence was in being able to receive the Word.

None of these things discredit nor disqualify him from being a prophet. Absolutely not! But it does show to us that he was an ordinary man who had a very special call upon his life, and that he needed the Lord to show him things just as much as we need the Lord to show us. The prophet brought home Bible commentaries and Bible dictionaries from the library when studying for Daniel’s seventy weeks, and he read the writings of Clarence Larkin and others when approaching the seven seals. But what it ultimately took was for the Lord to come down and give him the correct understanding on these subjects and others, just as the Lord does the same for us in our private times of study.

By taking a moment to look back on our own lives, we can quickly see how our understanding of things changes over time, becoming more refined and detailed as the years roll by. When we thought we had a proper grasp of a subject, we later came to realize that there is so much more we had not even tapped into as yet. This is what progressive revelation is all about; it is God taking us on a journey of self-discovery, learning more about ourselves from the pages of His holy Word.

Perhaps a startling realization for many of us is that our understanding of the Word today is clearer than what the prophet had in his own day! The prophet did not know everything, for God did not show him everything (2 Kings 4:27). But the things he was shown, he in turn shared with us, and the fivefold ministry has taken those things and has been expounding upon those things in an even greater measure, because the time we are living in now is the season when all scripture is rapidly coming to pass all around us. The prophet saw many things in visions, but we are living in the day when what he saw in vision is actually materializing on the earth; that is why our level of understanding on many things is more defined. This in no ways lessens the necessity for God sending a prophet to us, for if there had been no prophet, then there would have been no message, and if there had been no message, then the Bible would have remained a closed book to us.